2.5-ish, i guess.

The cultural interplay is pretty great. As is the setting and the scenario itself. I thought the core idea behind this book was great. How often do you see a hero being done like this? And by that I mean a hero that enthralls and corrupts and is a major force of and source of conflict/cosmic horror. The characters aren't too special, but they're alright, and the same is true for the prose.

Overall, this is probably a recommendation if you like cultivation, long series and slow progression.

For me, the giant elephant/deathspawn in the room is the length of the book. It's what's earned it its rating. There are over 1200 pages here and the story that gets told doesn't justify that kind of page count for. There are too many training arcs and too little focus. I like the multitude of characters, but that aspect also feels like it could have been refined. In the end, this is a 1200 page book that feels like the introduction to a giant saga and as such the conclusion of the first book honestly wasn't particularly satisfying. It didn't feel like an actual arc concluded here. Instead, a minor victory in a conflict that most likely won't matter in the end and the feat of staying alive is basically what this book was about. It feels like a very minor step in the overall story, with the focus being kinda character development. That sounds ok, but it should have been possible to do more irt the greater conflict in book1.

Anyway, i'm curious about the interpretations people have come up with for this. You can do a lot with the premise. The hero can be stand-in for a major force like climate change or religion. And the latter also works with the whole deathspawn vs natives angle displacement/hegemony desires as allegory for e.g. the middle east n stuff.